How to beat procrastination and get more productive with your work

SMART goals, apps and a 21-day challenge are all on standby. Who'd have thought it?

(Rennett Stowe/flickr/CreativeCommons)

Douglas Adams - author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - once famously said: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” Although comical, managing time is sadly an imperative of everyday life - and one that becomes increasingly more important as life goes on.

However, in a world with a multitude of distractions, many of us are now incapable of starting a task and finishing it. This is a problem I’ve suffered from too. Procrastination at its finest? Quite possibly.

Procrastination can come in many forms, and be a result of many things. So, I attended a ‘beating procrastination’ workshop to find out more about the issue that plagues my concentration every day.

People checking their phones constantly - even when they aren’t messaging someone - is something between a bad habit and an addiction. Often resulting in scrolling through the same Instagram posts over and over again. It has become second nature.

On the venture to conquer procrastination, it’s necessary to address what causes it. Some causes include impulsivity, delay, tiredness, and close proximity to temptations. Impulsivity is all about getting easily distracted and I find that social media is the number one enemy when trying to stick to a task.

The immediacy of the digital age we live in means there are so many more distractions. The solution: turn your phone off and hide it a different room. Even lock the door if you have to. Another excuse for not getting on with a task is the deadline seems to be, what feels like, months away. “It’s ages away, and besides, I work better under pressure,” the master procrastinator says. But it’s worth realising that, if a deadline is three weeks away, the lecturer is probably expecting you to take a bit longer on it than the three hours you did it in the night before, while jacked-up on energy drinks.

One of the things I learned from the workshop was how to successfully set effective goals. These were called SMART goals for being Specific, Motivational, Achievable, Results-driven, and over a Timescale. This process of goal-setting is essential to time-management and enables people to complete a task well.

Let’s use the example of revising for an exam in June. Instead of having ‘revise biology module’ scrawled helplessly on a Post-It, this could be a much better alternative:

Make revision flashcards for each lecture, one lecture covered per week, over the ten weeks running up to 15 May. I then have enough time to test myself in the run up to the exam on 1 June. The motivation to get the flashcards made each week could be going out at the weekend. This will help me to manage the workload, and feel confident going into the exam, and help me do well.

This changes a vague, and uselessly titled task, into a detailed SMART goal.

Another option for breaking your lazy approach to work is the 21-day challenge, which includes four simple steps:

1. Set timer on your phone (airplane mode if you are likely to be distracted) to 30 minutes or an hour
2. Work until the alarm sounds. Keep going if you don’t feel you’re making enough progress
3. After you meet your time target, cross the day off in red pen on your planner.
4. Do this every day for 21 days. The challenge is to not break the chain.

It takes around 21 days of repeated action to form a new habit, so it’s understandable how getting into a routine like this can help beat procrastination. There are also apps available for your phone that will help you with time management and organising tasks. Pomodoro can help you keep up with the 21-day challenge, and Asana is a useful task-organising app.

Overall, the key to beating procrastination lies in keeping distractions to a minimum and by setting SMART goals. Keeping work and play separate is also a useful way of ensuring you get the work done so that you can also have fun and relax.

As human memory spans are said to be decreasing, it’s clear we should be conscious of ways to maintain concentration in order to prevent being subject to habitual time-wasting.